Fungus heaven
Yesterday I took a drive out to Mount Macedon to investigate the possible existence of weird fruiting fungi. I can now confirm it exists.
It was a much-needed trip, a distraction from the very recent passing of our beloved Lottie and to make good use of my last week of leave from work. It was also perfect weather.
I drove out to Sanatorium Lake having noticed plenty of recent fungi observations there on iNaturalist. And oh boy, I was not disappointed. It's everywhere. I parked at the Days Picnic Area and followed the walking trail to the lake. As soon as I hit the trail—literally two metres in—I spotted my first fungus and it kept going from there.
I'm sticking with my blog format of one image per post but I've made a Flickr album of all the fungal photos. Take a look!
As well as loads of different mushroom-like (cup, stem and gills) fungi, I saw some that looked like scoops of vanilla ice cream as well as weird jelly. I forgot to bring my fungi book both yesterday and today so I'm devoid of terminology, but you get the idea. I didn't want to juggle my camera, phone and multiple pairs of glasses any more than I already was so I didn't make any iNaturalist observations.
It was much nicer just to walk slowly, look around and snap photos. It was so quiet out there that I discovered that my camera makes a very soft whirring sound when the button is half-pressed. I'd had no idea.
The lake itself is a peaceful but stagnant man-made puddle. I mean this in the nicest way. I enjoyed walking around and talking to the little brown birds hopping around the place (I forgot my bird identification book too!).
By the time I returned back to the picnic area it was about 10.30am and much of the weirdest and gooiest of fungi had already broken down or disappeared completely. So I timed it pretty well.
Afterwards I drove to Hanging Rock and enjoyed a walk, still in perfect sunshine. I didn't take any decent photos, just phone photos, because I had the wrong lens on my camera. But it was so nice to be there with just a few people around. Given the size of the car park I can only assume it absolutely heaves on weekends.
As for the rest of this week I'll be celebrating my birthday on Friday and keeping busy with outings to the zoo, the footy and various places around Melbourne.
